Byzantium Yet Fallen

The Critical Lessons for Christians in the Long Shadow
of 1453

by Paul J. Cella III

Round about five and a half centuries ago, the Roman Empire was at last extinguished.
By then the Empire was, of course, Greek, not Roman; Christian, not pagan;
and no longer strong, but pitifully weak. Dispossessed of all of its Anatolian
and Asian provinces, and most of its European ones, all that remained was the
great city of Constantinople, much of which was reduced by privation, disease,
and depopulation to overgrown ruins.

European Islam & the Doubtful Future of Christian Europeby William Murchison

The Ottoman Turks, under a great conqueror, Mehmet II, besieged the city
beginning in April 1453, on the day after Easter. They outnumbered the defenders
ten to one; possibly the fell Janissaries, the special forces of the world’s
finest military, alone outnumbered the defenders.

A pious, brave, and noble man, by grim irony named Constantine, was the last
Byzantine Emperor: He led his small force of Greek and Italian soldiers with
stoic dignity and courage. He died on the very walls of the city with which
he shared a name.

The Last Day

A series of omens shook the city in her last days: a lunar eclipse; thick
fog for days, a phenomenon unheard of in those lands; an eerie red glow around
the dome of Hagia Sophia. Some historians now attribute this glow to the local
effects of a massive volcanic eruption in the Pacific Ocean, but pious and
mystical Byzantines naturally interpreted it as the withdrawal of the protection
of divine providence from the Second Rome.

A Mass was said at Holy Wisdom on Monday, May 28; at last, in this final
hour, Catholics and Orthodox joined together in worship of the Risen Lord.
Greeks who had sworn oaths never to darken the doors of a church contaminated
by Romish heretics heard liturgy next to Italians who had declared the Orthodox
more loathsome than the infidel Turk.

There, in that last agony of the Roman Empire, Christendom was unified, and
the Church breathed with both her lungs. There, in the person of the ragged
remnants of Constantinople’s defenders, the sons of the Church Universal
joined in true fellowship. There, in this greatest of tragedies, and only at
the bitter end, was a true Christian brotherhood of Greece and Rome.

The lineaments of the emperor’s final speech are known to us. John
Julius Norwich, near the end of his three-volume history of Byzantium, gives
us perhaps the most moving construal:

He spoke first to his Greek subjects, telling them that there were four great
causes for which a man should be ready to die: his faith, his country, his
family and his sovereign. They must now be prepared to give their lives for
all four. He for his part would willingly sacrifice his own for his faith,
his city and his people.

They were, he continued, “a great and noble people, the descendents
of the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome, and he had no doubt that they would
prove themselves worthy of their forefathers in the defense of their city,
in which the infidel Sultan wished to seat his false prophet on the throne
of Jesus Christ.” Then,

turning to the Italians, he thanked them for all that they had done and assured
them of his love and trust in the dangers that lay ahead. They and the Greeks
were now one people, united in God; with his help they would be victorious.
Finally he walked slowly round the room, speaking to each man in turn and begging
forgiveness if he ever caused him any offense.

It was the last speech of an empire of orators; the last theological counsel
of an empire of theologians; the last exhortation of an empire of soldiers—the
last day of Rome and the final public words of the Roman Emperor.

The City Falls

The Ottoman engineers’ attempts to sap the city walls had repeatedly
failed in the teeth of Greek cunning and intrepidity, and finally the Sultan
simply hurled his forces against them, in wave after wave, beginning with the
least capable mercenaries and ending with the terrible Janissaries.

The slaughter, there on the walls, was considerable, and yet the Christians
held out for five further hours. But then the defense finally broke.

A group of Turkish irregulars had discovered an insecurely locked, or perhaps
a treacherously unlocked door, plunged through it, and managed to
raise the Sultan’s standard on a high tower. This, with the loss of the
great Genoese commander Giovanni Giustiniani, brought despair and final defeat.

The emperor and his closest surviving lieutenants flung themselves into the
ever-growing mass of Turks, and died there. The City of Constantine was now
broken. Constantine son of Helena had founded it; Constantine son of Helena
perished in its final defense. The earth stood still and the heavens wept.

The slaughter and rapine that followed need not be dwelt on at length. It
was unspeakable. Children raped on Christian altars; women and the elderly
impaled; blood running on the streets; St. Sophia a great bloodbath, then a
mosque. Legend holds that several priests vanished into the very walls of the
church, to return when Constantinople is liberated from the yoke of the Mohammedan.

Untold Greeks were captured and clasped in fetters, the maidens and attractive
boys destined for Turkish harems, the strong boys for the barracks of the Janissaries,
to repeat the conquest of other Christians in other lands; and the Orthodox
Church herself was seized into a captivity under which much of her toils to
this day. The slave markets of the world showed a rapid depreciation in their
miserable commodity for months to come.

Though he had promised three days of looting (to entice those of lesser piety
in his army), the Sultan called a halt to it after one, so terrible was the
pillage; few complained. The city was vanquished and violated. He established
the Greeks under the standard dhimma contract, Islam’s system
of official subjugation and humiliation: a kind of Jim Crow for infidels.

Eventually order was restored, and before long the city was thriving again,
after a fashion, under Turkish suzerainty. Human resilience is a remarkable
thing. But the Roman Empire was no more. The morning of May 29, 1453, shone
with the last sunrise over Greek Rome.

Captivity & Dignity

It is one thing to recite a great and moving story from history; to remember alone
is a worthy endeavor; but it will always be asked what we can take from this
history. What relevance has it for us today? Allow me to suggest
some principles or lessons.

First, though the Queen of Cities did fall, and though the Holy Orthodox
Church was taken into bondage, yet the faith endured. I am not myself Orthodox,
but I have dear Orthodox brothers and sisters in Christ. Their church yet stands
in dignity and witness. The end of a civilization was not the end of a church.
The Orthodox Church has rendered, and still renders to a bewildered world,
a stirring witness of suffering and perseverance in the Lord.

None should dare minimize this suffering. None should dare let his theological
differences with the Orthodox Church blind him to her agony under the yoke
of the Turk. Above, I called the dhimma contract “Jim Crow
for infidels.” This was no piece of polemical hyperbole. The similarities
are unmistakable, and gather, as it were, around the same points of emphasis.

Both the Jim Crow system in the American South, overthrown relatively peacefully
in the Civil Rights era, and the dhimma system, which endures in
various locales to this day—and is still, according to some studies,
the genuine aspiration of millions upon millions of Muslims—were purposed
toward a terrible thing: the degradation and servitude of a people.

This is my second principle or lesson: The full wickedness of the Islamic
system of subjection must be perceived rightly. And the analogy with American
history is an effective one. The primary differences between the two systems
are two in number: (1) Jim Crow was a contrivance of oppression based on race,
while the dhimma is, in our vernacular, faith-based; and (2) the
oppression of blacks, whether in slavery or in legal subjugation, always stood
in tension with the wider political order, while the subjugation of the infidel
is the natural issue of the political theology of Islam.

Christians and other reflective men in the South were never really at peace
with the system of subjugation. From Jefferson and Washington to Lee and Jackson,
great men of the South were repelled by it. Even its defenders called slavery
a peculiar institution.

There is nothing peculiar, under Islam, about vengeance against that rebellion
against God of which dogged unbelief gives evidence. Under Islam, the system
operated effectively without internal criticism. What criticism there was (and
it is impossible to imagine there was not considerable discontent in the hearts
of many) could only remain muted. The origins of the dhimma were
in the eternal word of God and reflected in the practices of his Prophet.

It would be as if the Southern reader found in the letters of St. Paul a
counsel between master and slave, not of humane treatment and obedience—“as
unto Christ”—within an already extant system, but rather of undying
enmity within a noble and just system: to the master a counsel of hardness
and suspicion; to the slave one of insurrection, a call to throw off that yoke
of oppression and take slaves himself from among the heathen.

Unbelieving Bondage

To put the matter otherwise: The whole moral revolution of Christianity,
the transformation of the human condition which worked itself out over centuries
in Christian civilization, positively subverts the idea of the indefinite
oppression and bondage of a people, while the whole moral system of Islam,
with its implacable antipathy for the unbeliever, buttresses that idea.

The perversity of the Orthodox Christians in clinging to their abrogated
religion was always an affront to Islamic piety. In a paradoxical way, it was
an affront to that towering dignity of the Islamic principle of equality.
Islam is, as Norman Mailer remarked in an interview, at its fundament an “immensely
egalitarian religion.” The equality of all men before God is one of its
most noble and attractive principles.

But those who reject the call of submission to God tarnish and falsify that
equality. Their rebellion must always gall the Islamic sense of honor: There
can be little allowance for them. There is no doctrine of grace to balance
the rigidity of equality. The hardening of the heart of Islam on this point
is evident even in the life of its founder. And the dhimma system
is its natural issue.

You cannot argue with the example of the Prophet. There could be no Lincoln,
arguing against the system based on the native tradition of the people who
enforced it—calling a people away from a sin that their own cherished
tradition condemns; calling them home. There could be no call of Islamic conscience
against the dhimma. Even in that immense equality, in some ways because of
it, the voice of human conscience was stifled.

Third, and perhaps more applicably, we can take from the tragedy of the fall
of Constantinople a lesson on the consequences of Christian division. We can
estimate the cost of disunion among men of the Cross of Christ. A generation
before the fall of the city, Constantine’s father had embarked on a long
and dangerous trip to the West, even as far as England, to plead for aid against
the menace of the Turk. He was mostly unsuccessful.

His eldest son, John VIII Palaiologos, whose immediate successor was the
last Emperor Constantine, had even submitted spiritually to Rome in order to
secure aid. This move toward union was bitterly opposed by many Byzantines,
who perhaps could not be made to forget older grievances, and the ensuing dissension
weakened the remnants of the Empire still further.

In his hour of need, the Emperor of Eastern Christians could secure precious
little aid from the West, and his own subjects revolted against his diplomatic
efforts toward that goal, hurling invective against the Bishop of Rome and
his Church, whispering that Unionism was treason.

Disunion’s Wages

It is well documented how much the West was enriched by the flood of refugees
from the defeated city, bringing with them the culture of Greece, refined by
the faith. It is to be doubted whether Christendom herself was enriched by
the collapse of a lung. Nor was the hunger of the jihad for conquest yet satiated.
Within eighty years Vienna was besieged; a century and a half later the same
city was besieged again, and only rescued by the valor of the Poles.

The razzias of the corsairs, taking slaves and plunder from coastal
lands on the Mediterranean, only increased—a terror for Christians by
the sea that strikes the modern mind as almost unimaginable. The Turk was the
acknowledged master of the eastern Mediterranean, with the great commercial
empire of the Venetians generally playing the role not of rival but of subject;
and even far to the west, that sea lay under the shadow of the Crescent. Even
the rising empire of Spain dared not challenge it openly.

A victory for the West on the Mediterranean would not come until 1565; as
it happens, on a portentous day: September 11, on the tiny island of Malta,
where a mighty triumph was gained against staggering odds. It would be centuries
before the Turkish menace was finally subdued, by which time successive revolutions
had sundered the unity of the West utterly.

To my mind, the lessons of this history amount to a challenge: First, as
a call to that charity which we owe one another in the Lord. Our theological
divisions must be sustained, but so must our brotherhood of love. For we are
members one of another.

Second, the lessons point toward the need for what our ancestors might have
called manliness, that militancy toward injustice that gives boldness. As Anthony
Esolen writes in his new book, The Ironies of Faith, it is humility
that allows us to feel the injustice inflicted on another, to set
aside our own perspective and pride, and it is manliness that impels us toward
outrage and sympathy.

With the jihad a renewed menace, its agents and propagandists abetted by
a mass media that has forgotten who we are and where we come from, its threat
to the West ever more acute, it would be well to remember the torment Christians
suffered at its hands when charity failed. It would be well to remember the
heroic stand made by Christians, largely abandoned by their brothers, when
the sun rose for the last time over Greek Rome. •

“Byzantium Yet Fallen” first appeared in the November 2007 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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